Brand Strategist

Straight Up Growth (SUG) is a fast-growing Amazon and Walmart commerce agency helping brands accelerate performance through data-driven strategy, retail media, content optimization, marketplace operations, and technology.

We are looking for an experienced Brand Strategist who can independently own the strategy, performance, forecasting, and client relationship for a portfolio of brands
.

This is a full-service strategy and account leadership role
, not a traditional account management position where strategy is divided across multiple teams. The Brand Strategist is responsible for developing the overall strategy, identifying opportunities, aligning internal specialists around that strategy, and ultimately owning the brand's marketplace performance with the client.

The ideal candidate brings recent brand-side or agency experience
, strong Amazon and/or Walmart expertise, proven advertising knowledge, advanced forecasting capabilities, and the ability to quickly turn complex performance data into actions that grow the business.

The Brand Strategist reports to the Head of Strategy & Brand Experience
.

• Serve as the primary strategic leader and day-to-day client partner for a portfolio of brands across Amazon, Walmart, or both.
• Create, own, and continuously evolve the brand's marketplace growth strategy
  , connecting sales, advertising, content, search, promotions, profitability, inventory, and retail operations.
• Take accountability for overall client performance rather than relying on separate internal teams to develop or lead individual parts of the strategy.
• Direct Advertising, Content, Operations, and Data resources against the priorities and opportunities identified within the overall brand strategy.
• Proactively identify performance risks and growth opportunities before they become client concerns.

• Build and manage complex sales, advertising, and growth forecasts at the brand, product, ASIN/SKU, and portfolio level.
• Translate historical performance, advertising investment, seasonality, promotions, inventory, launches, pricing, and marketplace trends into credible forward-looking forecasts.
• Develop annual, quarterly, and monthly performance targets and clearly explain the assumptions and strategies required to achieve them.
• Continuously evaluate actual performance against forecasts and adjust strategy when the business is ahead of or behind plan.
• Bring proven hands-on experience managing or directly leading advertising strategy and campaigns for brands. This experience is required even though this role will have Advertising support.
• Understand how retail media investment connects to total marketplace performance, including revenue, profitability, organic ranking, customer acquisition, and long-term growth.
• Evaluate advertising performance across metrics such as ROAS, ACOS, TACOS, CVR, CPC, CTR, NTB, branded vs. non-branded search, and customer acquisition.
• Partner with Advertising Managers on execution while maintaining ownership of the broader advertising strategy, investment direction, business objectives, and client recommendations.
• Identify when advertising investment should increase, decrease, shift between products, or change based on business performance and forecast expectations.

• Quickly identifying meaningful performance opportunities within complex datasets is critical to success in this role.
• Analyze sales, traffic, conversion, advertising, profitability, inventory, content, keyword, competitive, and customer data to identify the highest-impact opportunities.
• Go beyond reporting what happened by determining why it happened, what it means to the business, and what action should happen next.
• Identify emerging performance issues, competitive threats, search declines, Buy Box challenges, catalog problems, conversion opportunities, and advertising inefficiencies.
• Translate large amounts of data into clear priorities and executable growth strategies.
• Lead recurring client performance meetings, strategy sessions, planning discussions, and QBRs.
• Communicate confidently with brand executives, ecommerce leaders, marketing teams, and operational stakeholders.
• Turn complex marketplace and advertising data into clear recommendations tied to revenue, profitability, and business impact.
• Establish performance priorities, communicate expectations, and maintain accountability against agreed-upon goals.
• Build trusted client relationships by consistently…